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The Art of Money Getting

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Re: The Art of Money Getting

#21

Post by anonym29 »

derektank wrote: post #12
whiplash451 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> low in extraversion and agreeableness I don’t know that these are awesome features for an engineer. There’s a big unsaid cost to this in my experience

If we’re being honest, highly agreeable, extroverted, conscientious, and non-neurotic people are simply going to be better suited to all forms of employment than the inverse. But, since personality is pretty durable, it’s easier to try and find a career where your weak spots are detriments, but not crippling.

A highly agreeable housing inspector isn't going to be better at their job than a disagreeable housing inspector. I want my housing inspector to be harsh, unforgiving, and not grant the benefit of the doubt.

A highly extroverted person isn't going to make for a better overnight custodial worker than someone who prefers a more solitary lifestyle.

An actor who can tap into the emotional currents of high neuroticism in their work can offer a more sincere and authentic performance than an emotionally flat one.

Low conscientiousness correlates with risk taking and can be an asset in roles where over-planning to the detriment of acting can be costly - think firefighters.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#22

Post by n0on3 »

Oh boy, this did not age well. Most cases of “extremely successful” people I can think of exhibit the opposite of these core principles: have no “knack” whatsoever, except not giving a shit about whatever they pretend to be their focus while only focusing on personal return; they contract clusterfucks of debts, just usually never end up having to repay them personally; very few of them even know what “going all in” means, they usually live easy while exploiting others to actually do anything; they have no integrity whatsoever, and they do not have to, since apparently demonstrating lack of it is no longer cause for being told by everyone to fuck off into oblivion anymore.

And yes, yes, of course there are good people out there too that just want (/need) money to get by, but it’s funny to read this and think about those with _lots_ of money

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#23

Post by sporadicism »

derektank wrote: post #12
whiplash451 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> low in extraversion and agreeableness I don’t know that these are awesome features for an engineer. There’s a big unsaid cost to this in my experience

If we’re being honest, highly agreeable, extroverted, conscientious, and non-neurotic people are simply going to be better suited to all forms of employment than the inverse. But, since personality is pretty durable, it’s easier to try and find a career where your weak spots are detriments, but not crippling.

I agree with this if what you mean is that employment generally requires conformity, passivity, accepting low autonomy, low creativity, etc. Otherwise, this isn't my experience.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#24

Post by fellowniusmonk »

Michelangelo11 wrote: post #14

> Barnum’s first rule: pick the work you’re built for, then aim to be the best at it. Edsger Dijkstra, in one of his letters, giving advice (IIRC) to a PhD student: "Do only what only you can do." Kind of funny to see one of the greatest computer scientists and one of the greatest public entertainers giving the same advice, but I guess that speaks strongly in its favor.

I could never do anything, I could talk fancy and bullshit and could come up with all kinds of great ideas as an ideas guy.

Nothing useful.

So I became a developer and data engineer, and I became really good at it even though, like the protagonist in Gattica (with whom I share other similarities), I had to work twice as hard and spend all my off hours obsessed with it because my nature worked against me.

While others with this natural prediliction could spend all their time in type 1 thinking I had to live in type 2.

But it was a success, and I found myself becoming an executive at long last on the strength of my technical abilities, and it turns out executives don't actually need to do much of anything and really, outside of maybe some complex CFO roles, executive roles are by far the easiest roles at existing profitable companies. I suspect csuite positions are actually the roles most secretly replaced by Ai already.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#25

Post by UncleOxidant »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #5

> They take whatever job pays and spend decades fighting upstream. I suspect that this affects a lot of folks in tech. There's a lot of money to be made, so people get into it. They don't really like what they do, so it's always a chore. Their work often shows it, too. I'm retired. I don't have to write software, but I spend more time writing software (for free), than I did, for most of my career. I like the Integrit…

> I'm retired. I don't have to write software, but I spend more time writing software (for free), than I did, for most of my career.

Same. Claude/Gemini/DeepSeekV4/Qwen3.6 are enabling me to do way more experimentation than I could do on my own. 10X at least. Not getting paid for any of it, but that's OK, getting paid imposes limitations on what you can work on and imposes responsibilities that I don't care to have anymore. There's a certain kind of integrity in that as well.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#27

Post by doug_durham »

amunozo wrote: post #2

The hardest thing is to know what's your best fit. Any advice?

What do you find yourself gravitating to? What part of your job comes easiest? That things are easy to you that other’s find difficult? What do you spend time learning more about even when you don’t have to? Those are directional. For me the first time I started writing code I knew that’s what I’d need to do for a living.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#28

Post by jonners00 »

thm wrote: post #4

For a more recent pop-culture version, I'd recommend Felix Dennis https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18749286-how-to-get-rich

I love this book, but its authority is somewhat undermined by the infamous Steve Jobs passage...

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#30

Post by sporadicism »

jonners00 wrote: post #28
thm wrote: post #4

For a more recent pop-culture version, I'd recommend Felix Dennis https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18749286-how-to-get-rich

I love this book, but its authority is somewhat undermined by the infamous Steve Jobs passage...

How's that? I am not familiar.
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